Maggie drove by this morning while I was sitting by the pond. With a big smile, she waved and shouted, “Thank you for all that you do.” I don’t know her all that well, but I imagine she spends her life making those around her feel good. I think that everyone should aspire to be like Maggie… and few will succeed!

It was spittin’ rain on the pond. Rain is so soothing. It is nature’s way of nurturing and washing the forest… pollen be gone! Rain also keeps the fire danger down. With every shower, I feel a bit safer. Like maybe we will get through this season without a catastrophic fire event. So, I can’t understand why so many people are bitching about the rain this year.

Lately, I have been drawn to a few trees that are extremely contorted. I’ve found two with trunks that start out nearly parallel to the ground—and I am talking about big trunks a foot or more in diameter. Then, after about

10 feet, they make an abrupt 90-degree turn and head for the sky. Something brutally crushed these trees when they were young saplings. However, they persevered and grew as tall as all the other trees in the forest. From an overhead drone, one would never see these trees as having a damaged saplinghood. I wonder if this is a an example for us humans?

Now that the pandemic appears to be in our rearview mirror (well maybe), I find all the conjecture about remote working fairly amusing. First of all, I consider the phrase working remotely to be a politically correct way of saying working from home—as in being able to work in sweatpants while doing the laundry and watching the kids. Oh boy, am I going to catch it for that one! 

Whatever working from home really looks like, the concept is going to cause some consternation in the workforce. Since we have not yet found a way to social engineer basic human behavior, there will always be aggressive, go-getter employees who see the opportunity to work in the office and be seen as a superstar standout and who quickly work their way up the ladder. By the same token, the employees working at home will fret about being left behind because they are not in the office. It will then fall to the HR people to worry about whether the company is treating the work-at-home employees fairly. This is yet another case of “You can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube.” 

My mother used to save empty Morton Salt containers so that one day she could cut the tops off and recover the last teaspoon of salt that refused to come out of those things. I attributed her behavior to having lived through the Great Depression—something I could not relate to, having not been there. Today, we have a whole generation of 20-somethings who have never lived with double digit inflation. So, while the rest of us are dealing with hyper-inflation, they will be living contrarian lives because they have never been there. 

And, life goes on…